


First, to be Unmade

by firetoflame



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-28
Updated: 2016-03-05
Packaged: 2018-05-23 18:21:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6125812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firetoflame/pseuds/firetoflame
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Love: it's giving someone the ability to destroy you, but trusting them not to. Natasha Romanoff was built to be indestructible. But Clint Barton has a bad habit of worming his way in where he doesn't belong.  Heck, it's how he got into SHIELD in the first place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It starts when they're young, because the young can be fixed. They can grow anew from the ashes of what once was. Children are resilient. They can be trained to smile through the horrors. Trained in the art of death with purpose that belies their age.

That is how Natalia Romanov comes to be.

At least, that is what she believes. The beds are hard and the chain around her wrist is tighter than the rest, only because she's managed to slip from it two nights in a row. She's learned things about her body that make it fun to play with her handlers. But the handlers do not play, and Natalia quickly learns that it is not fun that she seeks from them, but pain.

She plays with them the way a cat does a mouse.

Their mistake is to think she is still the mouse.

With deft movements she pops her joints and slips through the cuffs again. No bonds will be able to hold her. They will learn that soon.

The floor is cold, as icy as the Russian winters, but that stirs little in her because she was raised on Russian winters. On frozen fingers and long marches that turned her lips blue. The tile in the kitchen is worse, but she flits up the cupboards and across counter tops, and this feels more like a game. More like . . .

She knows someone's there, even before the shadow moves. It's the weight of the room, suddenly heavier, air displaced around them both.

Natasha slips from the counter, balancing on her toes, hands folded behind her back as she watches the woman step into the light, ghostly under the moon, the spill of her lipstick like blood across her face.

"It's late, child."

"I know," she replies, though she does not apologize because they both know she is insincere.

Madame doesn't play and Natasha knows she is not fooled by her cherub face. She cannot bat her green eyes and be sent on her way. Madame knows better.

"Come Natalia. There is something I would like to show you."

Her hand comes out and Natalia reaches to meet it. She leads her through the halls, but not back to the sleeping quarters. Instead she takes her into the school, their footsteps echoing in the empty, marble laid halls.

They stop outside a heavy door and inside Natasha stares.

The room is long and smells of old. Old wood and old windows. Old sweat. Old blood. Mirrors run the length of one wall, a barre across them. This is where the older girls practice on tipped toes in black satin suits.

This is where they dance.

Madame takes her hand and moves her body, arms tall, legs bent, toes pointed. _Pirouette. Plie. Soubresaut._ These are the things she learns under the moon.

"You will practice until the sun comes up," Madame tells her.

"And when it comes up?"

"You will practice until it goes down again. You will bleed by the end of it, but you will be too tired to leave your bed tomorrow night. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Madame." This is to be her punishment.

"There is beauty in pain, Natalia. I promise you that."

. . .

Natalia bathes away the blood of a kill that will pay enough to get her across another border.  The key to a successful escape is to keep moving. And though she's leaving a bread trail for them to follow, those that will come after her will die.

There will be no more missions.

Her ledger for the Red Room is full. Full of aches and pains that run to her marrow, so deep it feeds her blood, as black as her namesake. The Widow is a darkness that lives inside her. A darkness that has hardened her to life.

It burns at her the way the fire did. The way the blue eyes of a child aflame do. She didn't know Drakoff had a daughter. That wasn't in the file.

_"Inconsequential," they told her. "The mission was a success."_

_"But the girl is dead."_

_"You're dismissed, Natalia."_

But that girl was her in mirror, burning from the outside in. _But children are resilient_ , she thinks. They can be remade. _Yes_ , Natalia thinks. _But first they must be unmade_.

Her eyes blink heavy and hollow, the uncharacteristic wet sting a pain more than anything. She tells herself she hadn't known. But would that have changed anything? Would her hands have stayed? Would her heart beat in her throat? Or is it only the scream of a child that plagues her now? That makes her weak.

With each scrub she tries to forget Madame and the Red Room, but the Red Room remembers her. It remembers in the scars that circle her wrists. In the dreams that slink into her unconsciousness, planting memories that she picks apart until she's not sure if it's real.

It remembers her in the way she holds a gun.

And the way her body molds to pretty, draping gowns, with plunging necklines made for ignorant marks.

These are the ways the Red Room remembers her.

Natalia sighs, knowing there is only one way she will be forgotten.

**_Before_ **

A white sunset flees towards darkness, disappearing behind the jagged peaks of the Western Mountains as Clint Barton falls from the Quinjet on a single rope of cabled steel. The threaded band courses over his hands and between his feet—a life line. The last of which he'll probably see for a week or so. There are various bets hedging the SHIELD pool right now, but he figures any more than a week and this so called problem will turn out to be another one of those ghost stories. And no one ever finds those. Not unless they want to be found.

The weight of the survival kit strapped to his back and his bow case—filled to bust with black, precision arrows—pulls him down faster than the wind clips against his face. He cuts a straight path to the gully below, landing in a brook of chilled water.

Stellar landing. _Not such a stellar spot_ , he thinks, frowning down at his water logged boots. Summer meant nothing up here on this godforsaken rock. He can see his breath burst from his lungs on impact, tiny crystals spinning in foggy wonder as the hair on the back of his neck stands up, catching the icy wind.

He pulls his hat over his ears, adjusting the Comm. for static. There's a huff of breath on the other end that might be relief, though Peakes would never admit it. Still, taking out one of SHIELDS best agents during a drop off wouldn’t be likely to get him promoted off chauffeur duty anytime soon.

"Couldn't put the damn harness on like every other agent, could you?"

"Flag my report, Peakes." The jet sways overhead as Clint climbs out from under its shadow.

"And what, have my ass hauled into the Director's suite for some one-on-one training about health and safety protocol? No thanks. And I'm deleting this transmission now."

Clint smirks. "Safe flight, Douche."

"Don't get dead, Ass-hat."

Now that sounds more like them. Clint hauls his gear over his shoulder and turns downstream. The water will be the fastest way off the mountain.

After that . . . well, he just hopes the mountain will be the hardest part of this mission.

**_After_ **

The demons in her head are back. They've come back with the triggers that are buried like mines inside her brain.

She knows she could fight them. Do a better job of it, but she's tired again. And fighting it takes so long.

It's easier to listen to the whisper. The Widow responds to the whisper and Natasha, _well_ , even she's afraid of the Widow sometimes.

"Why are you here?" she asks him, her voice sharp, stinging like acid. She feels like a snake, coiled and twisting, ready to strike; she wants to hurt him. There's no reason really, only instinct and feeling. He's warm, orange and pink in her peripheral, and she's so cold: just blue, _blue_ blood. Dirty blood. She wants his warmth; she wants to destroy it, stop it from burning her.

"To get my partner back," Clint answers simply, twisting that infernal bow in his hands. Round and round, left to right, fingers running along the string, plucking away like it's some out of tune instrument and staring down the length like critical inspection will mend the curves in the wood. It won't. No matter how long he looks the dents will be there and the string will sing off key.

It's grating on her nerves. The bow is his armour, held between them like a threat? But he never moves to strike her, never raises it in defence. She doesn't understand this. But she is sure of one thing. "I'm not your partner."

"Maybe not right now, but when you're done being broken, I'm going to help fix you."

"Is that what you think?" She's looking at her hands again, balled against her thighs, hard knuckles digging shallow graves into her skin.

"It's what I know."

He calls her Tasha on the way out and the soft reverence in his voice drives her mad. She channels every hateful emotion, the ire building beneath her skin, tainting her blood, and waking the monster that lives inside. With desperate motions she reaches the coffee cup he has left on the side table for her and sends it sprawling across the room.

The caramel liquid bleeds down the wall, puddling on the floor, pooling like her emotions.

The anger is gone now. Everything inside her simply hurts. She wants to scratch at her eyes, the heavy pressure there, but the bonds won't let her. She finds little relief against the flood of tears she refuses to let fall.

Instead she throws herself down against the pillows.

But she does not cry.

. . .

Outside the door Clint thinks he may have just chipped away at something. He smiles, though the relief is short lived. Tomorrow her walls will be twice as thick and he'll have to work twice as hard to remind her. But the Widow was not made overnight, and her web will not be untangled in a day.


	2. Chapter 2

Time unfolds in heartbeats when your eyes are closed. This is how Natalia learns to function in the dark. How she maps and plots and plans. Heartbeats catalogue what her eyes cannot.

"You will break her," the trainers say because they think she is asleep. But Natalia does not sleep, not while others breathe beside her.

"That is what is required to make her ours. We have our orders."

"She is only a child."

"They are all only children when we take them."

"She loves him."

"Love is weakness."

The pulse in Natasha's throat beats uneven as the jeep jostles through the streets. And though her eyes are closed, she knows the route well, can feel the dips and curves of the road, the familiar grate of pebble under tire. She has travelled it by foot many nights.

When the jeep stops the building she finds is also familiar. A haven she has come to hold in the last pure place in her heart. In sixteen years she has done things that have turned the lips of even the fiercest Red Room trainers.

These trainers escort her up the cold concrete steps of the abandoned apartment complex, forever one step behind her.

Alexi is cold when she finds him in the apartment she knows well, his body rigid with death and pale like the snow. There is a tremor in her hands that doesn't belong as she reaches for the fine black hair along his forehead.

The mark of the Madame is carved into his chest.

"Leave me," she says to the trainers, eyes pulled tight as she focuses on the wall, painting the image of the men behind her. She hears the click of the gun that they draw. Their security measure.

"Back to the jeep," they bark.

They are dead before either takes their next breath.

Natalia brushes her fingers over Alexi's lips, like frost beneath her fingers. She has learned her lesson. She will not love.

That is the first time she runs from the Red Room.

Ivan finds her two weeks later because he is the best. She will have to kill him next time.

She has learned both lessons and next time she will be better.

**_Before_ **

This is how it finally comes to blows, with the archer poised over her bleeding and broken body. The chase lasted longer than she expected, perhaps could have gone on longer had the Red Room not been in pursuit as well.

That had been an annoyance, hence the gun shot to her thigh.

This SHIELD agent, well, this has almost been fun.

Almost: in that kind of dark and twisty way only two assassins can have when measuring mark and merit.

But now the chase is over; now he lords over her, bowstring taught. If she weren't looking death in the face she might be more impressed. If she weren't looking death in the face she might have more reason to hide how tired she really is, how welcome this end will truly be.

Then he does something that surprises her and lowers the weapon.

This is his first mistake.

Then he smiles, and this is perhaps her undoing, her own mistake, because she tips her head, admiring the way his heavy features smooth out when the smile turns to a smirk. The next thing he does is offer her a job.

He must be fucking with her.

And though she has often played with her food, she is never the mouse. She does not accept.

"Look," the archer finally says. "You don't have to come with me. But only one of us is allowed to leave here if that's your decision and I've got dinner plans . . .  also you've been shot, you've got maybe another three minutes before you'll need a tourniquet. If not you'll bleed out."

She looks up between the curtains of hair that cling to her neck in sticky waves, some of it blood, some of it sweat, and a swift darkness clouds her face.

"You're playing games with me," she says.

Then she lunges.

**_After_ **

This is where it begins: the partnership that will become SHIELD legend in just a few short years.

It starts the moment she lunged. The moment she chose to stop holding pressure on her wound. She's smart. She would have known she'd pass out from blood loss before she could kill him. She chose to come in. At least, that's how Clint's looking at it as she's rolled into the SHIELD medical bay, unconscious.

The infamous Black Widow, taken out by blood loss. He's pretty sure no one in the SHIELD betting pool saw that coming.

It's hours of surgery before she's admitted to the facility properly and perhaps this is for the best. The anesthesia keeps her under. It gives SHIELD time to prepare.

Clint thinks the cell they make for her is fine. It's a little bare, stripped of anything they figure she can use as a weapon, and as much as he doesn't want to treat her like a criminal because he knows there's so much more to her—he's spent weeks trailing her, learning her moves, her likes, dislikes—she's killed a lot of people. Still, Natalia is not the Black Widow; she is no robot. And it was Natalia that chose to come in. The Black Widow, well, she might have wanted to kill him, but Natalia knew that she wouldn't. She had to have known.

This is what Clint tells himself as he watches her through the one way glass. He comes every day and like clockwork Natalia finds him in the window. A window she cannot see through, and it unnerves him and fascinates him, and so he continues to return.

When she's healed enough to walk (which takes far less time than it should), the straps around her wrists are removed and the gurney is replaced with a bed and Natasha does not kill the doctor who comes to assess her.

She does however take to pacing the room and Clint feels the shift. It's subtle and slow, because maybe she's fighting it, but the Widow is in there too. Maybe it's a self-preservation thing.

Fury and Hill and Coulson take to watching too.

It's become a sort of thing now.

Hill, as always, is the first to speak. "You know keeping her here, breathing instead of in the morgue, is a ridiculous idea, right?"

Natalia walks by the window, turning to stare through it, eyes cold, lips twitching a gentle kind of madness.

"She's out of her mind," Hill says.

"No," Fury shakes his head, like he has for many days now, "she's too far into it."

. . .

Some days are like that. Some days she paces and stares straight through the window, tracing the outlines of their bodies that she cannot possibly see. And sometimes she sits in the middle of the floor and sobs.

"It's like two completely different people are in there," Clint says, forearm pressed against the glass where he stands.

"This is what you saw?" Fury says. "When you trailed her through Europe?"

"Yes."

"Do you still think it was the right call?"

"I never said it was the right call, Sir; just a different one."

"Very well, Barton."

"What now?" Clint asks. He's been afraid for this moment. Afraid that after everything Fury might still chose to execute her. He's not sure what prompted him to bring her in, but he's grown almost fond of her now and he'd have half a mind to turn her loose if the kill order was given. And that's a precarious place to be.

"We undo the conditioning. Hope you're ready."

"For what?"

"Oh," Fury laughs, deep and low. "You brought her in, Barton. She's your problem. Say hello to your new partner."

. . .

Before they think she's ready to start seeing the SHIELD therapists, Clint's offered up for a field test. Fury approves it without Clint's input which is how he finds himself on the inside of the cell door on a random Tuesday in March.

This isn't the first time they've spoken.

It's usually just from the other side of a door, where she can't wrap her hands around his throat. He wouldn't exactly call them friends, but he's the closest thing she's got to an ally in this place and he's hedging his bets that she won't kill him. Maybe he's insane; Hill seems to think so. She's started a betting pool with odds on him dying today.

So is he afraid of Natalia? No. Natalia is reasonable.

The Black Widow, however, gives him pause.

He doesn't know who she is right now, so he offers out his hand. If she breaks anything he'd rather it be something they can cast. There are parts of his body he'd rather not have crushed.

"Don't," she says, arm jolting back as if burned. She curls up further on the bed, away from him. "Leave, Agent Barton."

"You won't hurt me."

"Is that what you know?"

"Just a hunch. Even if you are more Widow than anything right now, you know it's in your best interest not to kill me. Doesn't exactly foster trust."

She looks up at him then, curious more than anything, and it hits him then, just how striking she really is. Her features are porcelain, precious and doll-like, with wide green eyes and pouty lips, and despite the exhaustion that gives her dark circles and the fact that she hasn't brushed her hair properly in weeks, he can see how with minimal effort she would be the undoing of any mark. And maybe heding his bets on trust was a stupid idea because it's obvious that hasn't been a hot commodity in her line of work thus far. The operation of the Red Room and SHIELD couldn't have been more different. SHIELD builds up agents. The Red Room destroys them. "You think I want them to trust me," she says. "You're basing this on what?"

He smirks despite himself and plops down beside her. If he's gunna die today might as well go out knowing he wasn't cowering in the corner like a kid. He almost feels like flashing Hill a grin, thought that might get him punched. "Gut instinct," he says. "Your desire for self-preservation."

"You're an idiot."

"So I've been told."

"Why are you here?"

"They all think you'll strangle them."

"And you?"

"I've got a clipboard. I could take you."

She smiles at him then and he can tell that it's not because she thinks he's being a fool, but because he genuinely believes he could take her, if given the chance. Maybe it's also a little bit because of the half-grin that eats up his face. It's charming and unassuming and she looks at him in a way that is wonder and disbelief and maybe, hopefully, like she doesn't want to kill him.

Maybe this is just part of her game and she's playing him. He really hopes not.

"Alright. Go on then," she says from her spot on the bed.

Clint nods and splays out on the floor of the cell. He leans back on one hand, taking a glancing skim of the questions he's been assigned to ask her. Paperwork sucks on a good day; this is . . . well, interviewing is not his forte. Might as well start at the top. "Date of birth?" he asks finally.

"Redacted."

"Oh, come on." He expects her to grin like she's joking, but she simply shakes her head.

"I don't know."

Clint sighs. "Look, I know women are sticky about their age and everything, but here I thought we were starting with the easy questions."

"I mean," Natalia begins, "that I don't know. I don't remember. I was young when I was taken in by the Red Room. Four, five maybe. Things like birthdays weren't high priority."

"Right-o," Clint says. "Makes sense. Well, you look like you'd have a winter birthday."

She fights what looks to be a grin and Clint counts it as a win. "Is this a jab at me being Russian?"

He smirks. "Maybe. December birthdays are overrated because, you know, Christmas. So I think November. Favourite number?"

"Who has a favourite number?"

"Twenty-two it is. Natalia Romanova, born November 22 . . . How old are you?"

"Twenty-four. I think."

Clint sighs and looks down at the questions. "So this history stuff is probably gunna be a lot of I-don't-knows, huh?"

"Perhaps."

"Yeah, okay." He tosses the clipboard aside and sprawls out on his back, hands tucked under his head as he stares at the ceiling. "So tell me stuff."

"What kind of _stuff_?"

"I don't know. Shrinky stuff. Like what you'll say when the white coats come in to examine you."

"You don't want those kinds of stories from me."

"Afraid you'll scare me off?"

"Yes. Something like that."

Clint lifts his head enough to look her in the eye. It's a challenge. "Try me."

She blinks at him once. Twice. Considering. Then: "The ventilation shaft on the rear wall is unlocked. I picked the screws out with the edge of my nail when the SHIELD guards switched shifts overnight. I know this is a place that rarely sleeps, but if you people do sleep it will most likely be during regular night hours because routine is hard to break, making it likely that no one will be watching the cameras for those few minutes. I know it happens at eleven o'clock because I start counting out four hours when they bring me my dinner at seven. A shadow passes under the door when the guards trade off. I also know that you're completely unarmed because the risk of me killing you with one of the weapons you bring in is higher than you killing me with said weapon. But I don't need a weapon to kill you. I could have you incapacitated in thirteen seconds and be in the vent. You wouldn't be able to follow me even if you managed to remain conscious because your shoulders are four point five centimeters too wide to fit. I'd be long gone before you could mobilize a team to catch me."

Clint sits up fully; he has enough sense not to gape at her. "Well, _shit_."

"Yeah."


End file.
